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I am heading out the door right now to go ring in the new year with my family and friends in the desert! I wish you all a very Happy New Year and I’ll be back in the office on Tuesday. Thank you for your patience with email until I return.
And just for fun… a photo I took in the car a few nights ago. Festive and fun 
Happy New Year!
Tonight is our big family dinner so I must get back to cooking and baking, but I just wanted to send out a quick holiday greeting. Happy Holidays!
For those of you who don’t consider pets part of the family you might as well stop reading now.
Ben and I had always wanted a dog and when we moved to Los Angeles we finally had the chance. We made sure to rent a place that was large enough, and with a yard, and that allowed pets. We knew we could never buy a dog, I was brought up with rescue dogs (we always had at least two, sometimes as many as four) and they were always the quirkiest and sweetest mutts imaginable.
We adopted Rita in early August of 2006 and she was quite the feisty pup. A rescue dog multiple times over, she was up in years (about 6 or 7 when we got her) so she wasn’t a dog that anyone else wanted. But she was sweet and adorable (in an unidentifiable mutt type of a way) and we loved her immediately. From the day we adopted her she became an important part of our family, traveling with us every time we hit the road, and taking up most of our conversations with friends and family.
Last night she had a terrible accident and didn’t make it. Ben took her to the emergency vet, but it was too late and there was nothing they could do. We are so so heartbroken. While she wasn’t young she had so many years left in her and since it was so sudden and unexpected, it was especially hard to handle. If you’re not a pet person this whole thing may seem a little over exaggerated, but if you’ve ever loved a pet as a part of your family, I hope you’ll understand how much pain this has caused us.
At this Christmas time it’s just another reminder to me, to love your friends and family fiercely, and to tell them every day how much they mean to you. Savoring every moment is the only way to live life. We will miss our little Rita dearly!
On Sunday Crissy and I brought our gear and husbands out to a park in LA to try out some new off camera lighting techniques. Having spent the morning poring over strobist and trying to memorize some rules of thumb, we pretty much just decided we’d try a bit of everything and see what happened. Trial and error if you will… we definitely learned a lot and we will definitely be heading out again to try out some more fun tricks. Here are a couple of my favorite shots from Sunday.
Marcus and Ben were both supposed to be our guinea pigs models but Ben preferred to be on the other side of the camera helping out with the equipment, so most of the shots we took were of Marcus. Thanks for being such a ham
This afternoon Crissy and I got together with all of our gear and our wonderful husbands/models and headed out to experiment with some new off camera lighting tricks.
It’s WAY past my bedtime and I have to be up early tomorrow so I can’t post a lot right now… but I just had to put one shot up because I think it’s hilarious. We did learn a lot and get some awesome and actually useful shots, but we had a lot of fun too
More to come soon…
